Tag Archives: Alt-Right. #resist

The signs are legion. They come in many shades from skulls and
flags to polos and BMWs. Whiteness is resurgent.

There are many flavors, all in some way aligned or at least signatories
to a non-aggression compact.

I spent some time in Rhode Island this past week in a
wealthy part of the state that abutted a rural one. The northeast has many of
these and I recognized denizens of both, peacefully coexisting or at the very
least ignoring each other. The wealthy, especially the young ones, are very
recognizable. I’ve spent some years around people like them and I knew the
look. The way they carry themselves is distinctive, the boat shoes and the
button down or polo shirts and that air the soft spoken confident (daddy can
get me out of anything) usually either slight of build or slightly athletic,
their maleness comes in the form of their privilege. The awkwardness that
usually comes with their age isn’t apparent in them as they wait at service
counters behind Oakley’s or Wayfarers, generally holding their head back just
enough to signal that the air in the room is theirs and they alone are allowing
you to share it.

The others, are working class to just barely upper middle class. Bedecked in grunt style and copious facial hair many of them resemble the late sniper Chris Kyle. Statistically its impossible for all of them to have served in the military although you wouldn’t know it without knowing them. Their Pickups are decked out in Realtree, spartan. NRA and/or skull stickers and judging by this I assume their politics generally range from apolitical to alt-right.

The second group I’m more familiar with, they populate the town
where I now live and hold court in the tows surrounding, some drive loud, large
and intimidating trucks and hold a deeper, more menacingly straight-backed confidence
that sometimes borders on threatening. They are the white rural analogue to the
wannabee gangsters that sped through the streets of the towns and cities in
which I spent much of my life. If I had a purse to clutch, I’d be doing so as
they came down the sidewalk, crossing the street as I did.

They both explicitly benefit from their whiteness. One
through inherited wealth, the other through inherited privilege. Neither will
generally openly admit it but both groups, regardless of who they vote for,
participate actively in white supremacy and are terrified of their advantages
being tipped.

After Charlottesville it became apparent that there was a
large contingent of both who are terrified enough to associate themselves with
a movement that will use violent intimidation as a fear response against losing
their hegemony. Fear makes strange
bedfellows, I remember the tensions growing up between the white working-class
kids surrounding my lower-class neighborhood and the wealthier people on the east
shore. Entertainment was rife with examples of class struggles among the still
majority whites. No one embodied that struggle between the partition and
working classes like John Hughes. The Breakfast Club, Some Kind of Wonderful, and
to a lesser extent Sixteen Candles all to one degree or another examined the
rift at the top.

Those depictions fizzled out as the 80’s ended, and Nerds became the new minority subset in white America. There was the occasional colored person (before we became people OF color) almost always their race was played for sympathy or laughs (the flamboyant gay black nerd, the awkward Asian dude who although he was clearly the smartest guy in the room never had the white gravitas to be anything but a running slant eyed joke all courtesy of Revenge of the Nerds) had all but otherwise disappeared.

Now as Whiteness as a concept is in both jeopardy and ascendance,
jeopardy because of dwindling birthrates and immigration and ascendance because
of pushback against those forces. White people are doubling down in larger
numbers on being white.

I’ve said this a few times, in some ways humankind in general and white men, in particular, are gearing up for some kind of war. We are animalizing in ways that are physically and socially apparent. The elevation of military service or the appearance of it in rural communities (who do commit more men and women per capita than any other) and that “look” moving into suburban communities as well, the reversion to a battle-ready body type bearded, mirror shades, indistinguishable from your typical Seal. The explosive growth over the last 10 years of everything “tactical” (most of it made in China, by the way), the reinforcement of the type of throwback maleness that toxifies the culture, the obsession with Spartan culture (or at least the non-gay parts) have signaled to me this coming culture change.

All of it, on purpose or by mistake, is a product of, is buttressed by and is a direct decedent of White Supremacy. Our nation was founded on it, racial delineation in this country took precedence over class divisions because of purposeful use of the idea that “whiteness” even at its most abject, was above everything else. After the Civil War, it worked well in terms of keeping the masses at bay and keeping the newly freed enslaved still. Not by government mandate but by armed citizen militias and the cultural embedding of an idea of superiority.

The government was an active participant when it had to be. It encouraged racial division on the state level which was ignored at the federal level. GI’s coming back from both world wars were denied the benefits their white counterparts enjoyed, delaying or outright deraining participation in probably the most expansive inclusion of Americans in the financial system. If you were white and participated in the war economy, you benefitted. Post great depression (whose devastation on minorities still hasn’t been fully researched and exposed) economic expansion during the war years barely touched minority communities, and government wasn’t very helpful in encouraging that recovery. Another round of White Supremacy was born, the Klan was revitalized and began another terroristic war on minorities.